LBJ, the CIA and the killing of Kennedy

In March this year, with considerable attention from the major media, more than 77,000 pages related to the assassination of JFK were released by the National Archives and Records Administration. Thus far nothing of great significance has been reported by those working their way though the documents. The solitary item of note is one which shows that James Angleton, the head of CIA’s Counter-Intelligence branch – the mole-hunters in current parlance – was receiving reports on Lee Harvey Oswald as early as 1959, the year ex-Marine Oswald had moved to the Soviet Union. Kennedy assassination researchers have long believed that Oswald had ‘defected’ for the CIA and this document seems to confirm that.

If there is a consensus among the researchers, it would be that in some way the CIA was responsible for the events on Dealey Plaza. Some of them – notably Jefferson Morley, formerly of the Washington Post – have interpreted Angleton’s early interest in Oswald as evidence that the Agency did the shooting.

This is highly improbable.

We know a great deal about the CIA’s operations of the past 70 years and there is no evidence that CIA Counter-Intelligence ever mounted covert operations on that scale; or, indeed, had the capacity to do so. The best explanation of Oswald’s ‘defection’ under CIA control I have seen comes from Professor John Newman. He has argued recently that Oswald was sent to the Soviet Union in hope that what he told the Soviet authorities might be detected in the discourse of the Soviet ‘moles’ presumed to exist within the CIA. Oswald’s ‘defection’, in other words, was part of James Angleton’s search for the KGB ‘moles’ within the CIA. (1)

Receiving zero attention from the major media and little from the assassination research community, was the release in January of an audio tape-recording from 1971, purportedly of a conversation between the Texas-based business man-cum-fraudster Billie Sol Estes, and Cliff Carter, the chief assistant of former President Lyndon Baines Johnson. This is where it starts to get unavoidably complicated.

LBJ was a crook who got seriously rich taking bribes from American business. One of those who had been enriching him was fellow Texan Estes who had been defrauding the US government of millions of dollars a year through a complex agricultural fraud and feeding some of that back to then Vice President Johnson. (2) When news of Estes’ fraud began to get reported – he made the front cover of Time magazine – possible witnesses in Texas began dying. One of the first books published after the Kennedy assassination, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, by a right-wing Republican Texan, J. Evetts Haley, wrote about Estes and dropped some broad hints about LBJ’s possible involvement in the deaths. (3)

The Kennedy brothers and LBJ detested each other, and in 1963, the Kennedys began a concerted attempt to gather enough dirt on Johnson to discredit him and thus get rid of him as vice president before the 1964 presidential election. On the evening before the assassination in Dallas, Life magazine was in the final stages of preparing a feature on LBJ’s corruption for the edition due on the 26th or 27th of November. (4) Their LBJ story was replaced by Life’s coverage of the assassination.

Billie Sol Estes eventually went to prison and said nothing about Johnson or the events in Dallas. Subsequently, he talked about secret recordings he had made, which he believed had kept him from being murdered. One of them, he said, was a 1971 conversation he had with LBJ’s assistant, Cliff Carter, in which Carter discussed the assassination he had helped to organise. (5) Estes claimed there was a witness to this conversation and this was confirmed in 2020. (6) The recording has now been released by Estes’ grandson.

Which raises the question of why the Kennedy assassination researchers didn’t look at the LBJ connection. There are several factors at play here. One is that most of the early critics of the official ‘lone assassin’ verdict were Democratic Party supporters and it simply didn’t occur to them to look at Johnson. His corruption – and the general corruption of American politics – had not then been written about much, and knowledge of it was largely confined to those in the political system. As president, Johnson had brought in legislation on civil rights and what we might call the welfare state, and was regarded as ‘a good Democrat’. 

Secondly, by the time fragments of information about LBJ’s role begin to appear in the 1990s, the assassination researchers had been pursuing other areas – centrally the role of the CIA, as indicated by its relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald – against indifference and disinformation from the political system and denigration as conspiracy theorists by the media and the academic  world. The few who came across the LBJ fragments dismissed them. 

And thirdly, of course, as in any field, people find it hard to change their minds. 

What I have outlined above is only one, minor but slowly growing strand in the current research. There is another that does involve the CIA. This is as disreputable to most of the researchers as the LBJ-dunit thesis, but like that will, eventually, make its way into mainstream assassination research. It concerns the claims of the late Chauncey Holt. (7)

He said he had been working for the CIA in a unit which was tasked to produce a rifle which would fire bullets which had already been fired by a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle – the make of rifle allegedly used by Lee Harvey Oswald. To do this his unit made a smooth bore rifle which, without the normal grooves – the rifling – in the barrel, would be be weak and inaccurate. The implication of this is that a section of the CIA wanted to fake an assassination attempt on JFK which would be blamed on the apparently pro-Castro activist Oswald. This would enable the Agency to pressure President Kennedy to approve a second invasion of Cuba. My guess is that onto this CIA fake assassination attempt the real assassination conspiracy by LBJ’s people was piggy-backed, knowing that the CIA’s fake attempt would ensure that no serious investigation would ever take place.

Notes

1. See Newman’s new book Uncovering Popov’s Mole. See the extracts and discussion at https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/28231-john-newmans-latest-on-popovs-mole/page/2/
2. There is a very good summary of all this at: https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKestes.htm
3. On this see https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/a-texan-looks-at-lyndon/
4. British researcher John Simkin was told this in 2009 by Life’s James Wagenvoord whose initial communication with Simkin is at https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/14966-life-magazine-lbj-and-the-assassination-of-jfk
5. This is discussed in Estes’s 2005 book, a copy of which is a free download at https://www.box.com/s/8b408e6999f8799dfd0a/5/251450825/1960277221/1
6. He is Kyle Brown. See https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/article/issue/80/the-lone-star-speaks-untold-texas-stories-about-the-jfk-assassination-by-sara-peterson-and-k-w-zachry/
7. I reviewed his posthumous memoir towards the end at https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/article/issue/71/jfk-chauncey-holt-and-the-three-tramps-redux/